


the beginning of reconstruction

by pettiot



Series: progress!verse [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-19
Updated: 2009-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:41:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23213437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Noah is used to betrayal.
Series: progress!verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668958
Kudos: 1





	the beginning of reconstruction

The reality of his actions failed to impact on Noah the day he agreed to this game, even on the day of actuality, when Noah lifted his brother's banner and four thousand men roared his brother's name. Bitterness sat on Noah's tongue, indigestible, twisted his lips; somewhere on the other side of the field the other captain -- Vossler -- sounded to signal the charge--

Reality still did not want to assert itself when, giddy with the love of force, his blade swinging like the arch of the sky, men once real suddenly no longer there and all courtesy of Noah's own hand -- giddy, he was, vertiginous with the height of horseback -- giddy, like a girl, Noah threw back his head, laughed, reeled, fell --

\--and it was the hands of his own men (not his! not his! Basch's!) that pulled him from that horse, with that clarion cry--

'Ronsenburg's gone mad!'

Reality, tenuous at the best of times: Noah practiced all his life at how to stretch and hang reality between words and wisdom. Noah learned from books where Basch wrote his own. Noah administered their estates, a dutiful son when Basch ran wild. Noah's wisdom had them draw a profit each year when others lots failed. Noah's reality flowered with the fields, full of Basch's absence, reality crafted of words once spoken in anger, half-heard and recreated, old arguments reconstructed by Noah alone when Basch never came back.

Noah never really understood what Cidolphus meant by reconstruction.

Cidolphus Bunansa of legend came to Noah's estate years before the General's men did, noting the skill, noting the efficiencies. Noah was not proud, for the man brought his sons and the other sons of landowners and said: 'Noah fon Ronsenburg, you will tutor these boys and teach them how to love this land as you do, else their children will find no future here for there will be no food, and we will have failed.' Noah was not proud, not then, for lecturing the law of the land scarce seemed the same path to heroism Basch had taken--

\--but now, roaring, alive, Noah thought of heroism, and he nearly touched it, nearly claimed it, Basch's men in his wake --

It was not real when they hung him, the knot to the side, a bag over his head, Basch's name on his lips.

It was not real when he dreamed a dream of dying, his knees flush against the side of a shallow-dug grave, and breath no longer his right to claim.  
It was not real when he woke, and they cut out his tongue and burned the bleeding to ash. Ashes: they made him watch as they razed his farms, his fields, his estates. Ashes: all he would ever taste again.

'Your brother is a writer,' the General said, calm, clear, 'one to stir the masses; I do not doubt you have had a similar education, and the potential to so write with as much fluidity. You understand, Ronsenburg, that we cannot allow the truth of this disaster to ever be heard.'

Noah agreed, silently.

They broke every bone in his hands, meticulous.

This, then, was the beginning of reconstruction.


End file.
